FLICKERS

Review: TWILIGHT

TWILIGHT

Stephenie Meyer’s wildly popular novel, Twilight — the first in a four book series about a 17-year-old girl who falls in love with the hunky vampire who sits next to her in biology class — bored me silly, but that’s clearly a minority opinion. In the novel, Bella and her cold-to-the-touch lothario, Edward, talk and talk and talk. For the beautifully photographed (by cinematographer Elliot Davis) film version, screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg (bless her) has pared the couple’s blather down to the essentials, as when Edward (Robert Pattinson) says to Bella (Kristen Stewart), “You’re my own personal brand of heroin.” Poor girl. How could she not succumb? Actually, Bella’s in love/lust the moment she walks into her new Pacific Northwest high school and sees Edward, who shuns her, and then loves her, obsessively. Eventually, he introduces her to his progressive vampire family — they eat wild animals, not people — and invites her for a game of bloodsucker baseball, where they encounter a vampire thug (Cam Gigandet) who begins stalking Bella. Director Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown) has drawn strong, star-making performances from her two leads, but in the end, she’s clearly no more interested in vampires than Meyer herself. In the 17-million copy land of Twilight, the calling card isn’t blood and fangs, but the exquisite, shimmering quiver of unconsummated first love. By that measure, the movie version gives really good swoon. (Chuck Wilson) 

Review: SOUL MEN (from LA Weekly)

SOUL MEN

      If the dream of every comic is to have his humor live on long after he’s left the stage, then the late Bernie Mac has exited this world on a high note. Soul Men, a comedy completed shortly before Mac’s untimely death in August, is no classic; but the comedian, who was a much better actor than he got credit for being (he’s superb in the little seen sports drama, Pride), is at his crackly, cranky best here. As swan songs go, Soul Men is pretty sweet.

     Mac plays Floyd Henderson, a present-day car wash mogul who, back in the 1970s, was an R&B back-up singer alongside a fellow named Louis Hinds (Samuel L. Jackson). They sang and danced behind Marcus Hooks (John Legend), who one day took off without as much as a goodbye. On his own, Marcus became a funk-soul god (think James Brown), leaving Floyd and Louis to part as bitter enemies after their one and only album together tanked.

       After 20 years of no contact, Floyd bursts into Louis’ flea-bag L.A. apartment with a plan for the two men to drive to New York and perform at an Apollo Theatre tribute show for Marcus, whose sudden death hasn’t exactly wrecked his former band mates. “I’m cryin’ the tears of a motherfuckin’ clown,” Louis declares before booting Floyd out the door, which gives director Malcolm Lee the chance to plant his camera at the end of the hallway and observe Mac as he goes off on a vintage comic tear. Stalking back and forth, moving in and out of camera range, mumbling and cursing like a sailor, Floyd is a funny, frantic mess. But the memorable, oddly moving thing about the scene is the sense one gets that Mac, as he paces and riffs, is conjuring forth his original comic self, the one that existed before a hit sitcom made him respectable and family friendly. In that dimly-lit hallway, the raspy-voiced, gleefully profane Original King of Comedy returns.  

       Louis, of course, finally opens the door, and the duo hits the road in Floyd’s lime green El Dorado convertible. They bicker, get stranded, and eventually start staging their old act in dive bars. Dressed in pimpadelic blue suits with white striping that Floyd has saved all these years, they slip into a version of “Boogie Ain’t Nuttin (But Getting’ Down)”. Their voices are ragged, but the old-school hand gestures and side-shuffle footwork is mighty fine. Is anyone surprised that Samuel L. Jackson can move as smoothly as he curses?

       When Louis steps off the stage in an Amarillo bar and glides right on into a country western line dance, the moment should be iconic — tough guys do dance — but director Lee doesn’t appear to be feeling the joy. He holds back, literally keeping the camera from fully entering the dance, and so the scene fails to soar. In films such as Undercover Brother and Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, Lee has displayed a gift for working with actors — among other things, he really knows how to ratchet up the comic pitch of an argument — but his visual style rarely matches the energy level of his performers. If the sight of Jackson doing a Texas two-step excites this director, it doesn’t show. 

       Soul Men dulls out in the home stretch, as screenwriters Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone (Man of the House, Life) employ increasingly silly side turns to delay Floyd and Louis’ arrival at the Apollo. But no matter: Mac and Jackson get us there, and then come the end credits, for which Lee has assembled a surprisingly long, and quite lovely, tribute not only to Mac, but to real-life soul man Isaac Hayes, who has a brief cameo in the film and who died this summer one day after the comedian.

       “You want to leave a lasting impression on your audience”, Bernie Mac says in an on-set interview, after which we see him working the crowd that  turned up to be extras in the Apollo Theatre sequence. He tells a risqué joke, he gives a stage hand a hard time, he entertains. Being an extra is a thankless job, but those lucky folks, you gotta figure, will be re-telling Mac jokes for the rest of their days. (Chuck Wilson)